Binary Cocoa Turns the Lights On

Vikings is the first game that we have coded a lighting engine for. We have used shaders before but this task went above and beyond and nearly crashed our brains. We went through many jars of bean dip before we were able to figure it out. Our friend Braxton Huggins put his brain to the grindstone and churned out the maths. Joseph gave him much needed help and they were able to make something that looks like this:

Excellent!

If you look closely you can see the viking ship at the bottom with it’s own light source that moves with it as it climbs through the cave. Having this lighting engine opens up several possibilities for us such as having lit up projectiles, enemies, heroes and even sheep! We have already implemented extinguishable objects which adds to the overall eerie atmosphere within the game. We are more than open to sharing our lighting code if anyone wishes.

We’re all still working full time jobs (except Stephen who has triumphantly returned to Idaho from Virginia) and it doesn’t leave us an enormous amount of time to work unfortunately, but we put in hours when we can. We hope to port the bits of reusable code from the previous vikings build and get it working on mobile phones soon! Keep your eyes peeled for possible testing opportunities and other exciting news.

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